Where No One Is Safe

With Israeli helicopter gunships and jets regularly pouncing from the blue
sky to attack vehicles, only the desperate or brave travel south Lebanon's
narrow twisting roads.

Most of them are civilians fleeing the villages that dot the hills southeast
of here, heading north for the relative safety of the port town of Tyre, or further
up the coast beyond the Litani river. But some vehicles head the other way  straight into the killing zone that south Lebanon has become since Israel's
onslaught against Lebanese Hizballah guerrillas began 13 days ago. These
are the
ambulances of the Lebanese Red Cross, driven by fearless young men and
women
volunteers who risk their lives each day to ferry casualties from villages
cut
off by shelling and bomb cratered roads.

"We have a protection because we are the Red Cross so we can reach villages
where others can't go," says Sami Yazbek, chief of the Tyre Red Cross
department. But on Sunday night, the emblem of the Red Cross was not enough to deter an
Israeli helicopter gunship from firing missiles into a pair of ambulances
loading casualties in the village of Qana, six miles southeast of Tyre,
wounding
an
already injured family of three along with all six paramedics.

One of the ambulances, driven by Qassem Shaalan, had left Tyre at around
10 p.m., having arranged to meet another ambulance coming from Tibnine, some
15
miles
away, at Qana, which lies between the two towns. The Tibnine ambulance was
carrying three people, a husband and wife and their 14-year-old son. All
three
had been injured in Israeli artillery shelling around Tibnine and their
condition was sufficiently serious to dispatch them to hospital in Tyre. It
took
Shaalan about 15 minutes to reach Qana, having steered his ambulance around
the
numerous bomb craters in the road. As usual, the ambulance's lights were on
full-beam, the internal light also was on, the revolving blue light was
flashing
on the roof and the Red Cross flag was lit up. Shaalan wanted everyone to
know
he was there.

The two ambulances stopped next to each other in the middle of the road,
engines running and lights still blazing away. The swap only took two
minutes  both Red Cross crews had done this before and the whine of a drone and
rumble of
passing Israeli jets overhead were further incentives for haste.

As Shaalan closed the back of the ambulance, however, a missile punched
through the roof of the vehicle and exploded inside. "There was a boom, a big fire and I was thrown backwards. I thought I was
dead," Shaalan recalls. He opened his eyes and checked himself to see if he
was
hurt. One of his colleagues, Nader Joudi, was standing, but the third member
of
the team, Mohammed Hassan, was unconscious. One of the Tibnine medics put
through an emergency call to the Red Cross operations room in Tyre that
they
were
under attack. Then a second missile struck the other ambulance. Hassan
started
regaining consciousness as the medics, all of them hurt, hauled the family
out
of the back of the ambulance and carried them into a neighboring building.
Several more missiles exploded on the road and around the building. The two
adults and the boy were lucky to survive, but all had received more wounds.
The
father's leg was severed by the exploding missile and he was losing blood
fast.

"The family was very badly hurt," Joudi says.
They had to wait an hour and a half for the rescue ambulances to arrive,
the
time it took for the Red Cross in Geneva to contact the Israeli authorities
and request safe passage to evacuate the wounded.The 50-strong Red Cross
team in
Tyre has had several narrow escapes since the war began  one of their
ambulances was almost blown up by a missile fired from an Israeli jet. But
Joudi
admits he was surprised that they were attacked in such a flagrant fashion.
"We have had near misses but they have never targeted us before," he says.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli authorities on why a
helicopter gunship had attacked a clearly marked Red Cross ambulance.
"We had all the lights on, the blue light was flashing and we had a light
on
the flag. There's no way that they could not see that we were Red Cross,"
Shaalan says.

But for these brave young men and women, a close call with an
Israeli missile was not enough to make them stay at home. They spent the
night
in
hospital but checked out in the morning.

"I took off my bandages before I went to visit my mother. She kissed the
ground when she saw me," Shaalan says. By the afternoon, Shaalan and his two colleagues from Tyre were back in
their
orange jumpsuits and reporting once more for duty.